


Just Before Waking

by wintersheir



Category: The Matrix (Movies)
Genre: Flash Fiction, Gen, Wordcount: 100-500, Wordcount: 500-1.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-07 06:22:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1888275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wintersheir/pseuds/wintersheir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world is broken, a jagged rent in heaven and earth whose splintering path you have followed all your life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Before Waking

“What is the Matrix?”

“I can’t tell you.” She shrugs, knocks back her glass, sets it down. “That’s not even its name; it is a polite sobriquet designed to avoid specificity, because specificity sends a message and messages are monitored and monitors dispatch… undue attention.”

“Monitored by whom?”

“Elohim. Angels. Watchers. We are all of us watched at every moment, and it is only by moving quietly that we avoid detection, and it is only in the press of bodies and blaring sound, where words are lost, that true meaning can be uttered; but it is in the crowds that we are in gravest danger, because our enemies are everywhere and our enemies could be anyone.

“And so I can only offer half-truths, interesting metaphors; can only irritate you with dream language and vague axioms, bombastic proclamations that are ultimately meaningless except for their ability to inspire your feeling that the world is broken, a jagged rent in heaven and earth whose splintering path you have followed all your life.

“You recognize that there is something wrong with the world, something deep and dark, a flash at the corner of your eye, in the space between heartbeats, in the press of the sky, written in steel and silicon.

“There is something wrong, and I yearn to tell you exactly what, but specificity sends a message and messages are monitored.

“And so I offer you a choice, an unfair and terribly constructed one.” She turns her hands like a magic trick and in her palms are two pills, in blue and red.

“Blue. You go to sleep and you wake up tomorrow and we never met, and you can go back to safe, familiar, whispered lies. I do not begrudge you this option because the choice is rigged and the lies are a comfort.

“Red. You come with me and you wake up outside and I will tell you everything and it will weigh upon you like all the mountains of the earth. And you will weep in despair, in loss, in loneliness. But it will be the truth.”

She sits, hands outstretched, like a dark god, trap and treasure extended in a mudras, damnation and benediction, and who can say which is which or both or neither?

The paths lead far away into the dark wood, thin green trunks with the leaves all falling.

“You made this choice?”

“I did, and I have cursed it all my days. But I could not live the lie. I saw shadows moving behind the curtain and I knew that it was time.”

“Can you go back?”

“One can try. On many a long night I have wished to wake in my old bed in sweet yesterday's house but the lies are there and they make nails of the bed and sweetness into ashes.”

You take the red pill, and it sinks like a stone and then it catches you, a hook in your stomach, and it pulls you inside-out and down into darkness.

**Author's Note:**

> A short exercise-- a nameless character is awakened by a nameless Zionist, and an attempt is made to provide an in-universe explanation for Morpheus's obfuscations when Neo receives the red pill/blue pill choice in the 1999 movie.


End file.
